Orizzonti Best Director Anuparna Roy talks about her debut film and journey from West Bengal to Venice 

Anuparna Roy, winner of the Orizzonti Best Director award at the 82nd Venice Film Festival for Songs of Forgotten Trees, a 77-minute film drenched in memories of times past and friends lost, is in august company. She is only the fifth director from the subcontinent, after Satyajit Ray (Golden Lion, Aparajito, 1957), Buddhadeb Dasgupta (Special Director Award, Uttara, 2000), Mira Nair (Golden Lion, Monsoon Wedding, 2001), and Chaitanya Tamhane (Orizzonti Best Film, Court, 2014), to bring home a trophy from the world’s oldest film festival.

Has the world of the girl from West Bengal’s Purulia district changed overnight? “It has,” she says. “The award places great responsibility on my shoulders. Every step I take from here on will be watched. I am a bit nervous, but also excited.” Roy says the validation for her film from the audience in Venice was extremely encouraging. “It was great to see the film resonate, cutting across geographical, cultural and linguistic barriers. It was particularly special because it is my first film.”

New to this women’s club

The director, who has just stepped into her 30s, is one of several Indian women who have, of late, broken into the international film circuit, with a few going on to bag major awards. Roy has joined a small but elite club of Indian filmmakers — Payal Kapadia, who has triumphed twice at Cannes (the Golden Eye for A Night of Knowing Nothing, 2021, and the Grand Prix for All We Imagine as Light, 2024), Shuchi Talati (Sundance 2024 Audience Award for Girls Will Be Girls), Varsha Bharath (Rotterdam 2025 NETPAC Award for Bad Girl), and Diwa Shah (San Sebastián 2023 Kutxabank New Directors Award for Bahadur – The Brave).

Interestingly, two of these feted titles have had the backing of filmmakers known for their adrenaline-fuelled, hyper-masculine films. Anurag Kashyap is a presenter for Songs of Forgotten Trees, while Vetri Maaran has produced the Tamil IFFR title Bad Girl. Roy views this in a positive light. “All seven producers of my film are men,” she says. “Ranjan Singh, who has been backing unconventional stories for a decade now, was with Songs of Forgotten Trees from the very beginning. He gave me a free hand. ‘It is a personal film, and you do what you feel is right,’ he told me.”

It was Singh who brought Kashyap on board, says Roy. Each of the other producers — Romil Mody, involved with films like All We Imagine as Light and Laapata Ladies; Navin Shetty; Sharib Khan; Vikas Kumar; and Bibhanshu Rai, a friend who has been with her since her short film Run to the River (2023) — has been a huge support, she adds.

After hours of an IT professional

The English literature graduate from Burdwan University’s Kulti Government College arrived in Mumbai at the end of 2021, armed with a corporate job after an aborted shot at a mass communications degree. “I erroneously thought mass communication would have something to do with filmmaking,” she says.

Roy started writing Songs of Forgotten Trees in early 2022. “Since I now had a job in Mumbai, I knew I would get an apartment. The moment I found the right one, I decided to make the film. It took us a year to figure out if it would be feasible to shoot in the residential society. We began filming at the end of 2023.”

Shot secretly inside the apartment, the film revolves around an aspiring actor Thooya (Naaz Shaikh, who has been Roy’s close friend of about six years), who does sex work to pay her bills. Thooya sublets the flat — which belongs to her “sugar daddy,” who is also her main client — to an IT sales executive, Shweta (Sumi Baghel). In a story exploring themes of remembering and forgetting, alienation and assertion, the two women develop a bond that helps them shut out the noise around them.

The two migrant women barely speak, but their relationship is cemented not only by the space they share but also by their gradual understanding of each other’s inner thoughts, compulsions, and misgivings as they begin to surface. “We had a workshop for three months. The three of us lived in the apartment to understand the complexities of the characters and of new-age relationships,” says Roy.

Memory and personal stories

“The essence was to bring out the memory of Jhuma Nath, my very first childhood friend,” she explains. “My father did not like my friendship with her because she was Dalit. I was in class V when Jhuma got married at 13 and then vanished forever. That sense of loss stayed with me. That is reflected in the film.”

The song in the film is a lullaby that Naaz’s mother used to sing to her. It was incorporated as an aural leitmotif (short, recurring musical phrase tied to a particular person, place, or idea). “It is associated with the good memories of her mother that the character played by Naaz wants to reconnect with,” says Roy. “A lot of Purulia will always be inside me. I still talk in my own language, which is very different from the Bangla spoken by elite Bengalis.”

She never misses an opportunity to visit her native place. “I make sure I go to my maternal grandmother’s home. The house is still there, but nobody lives there anymore. I see the poverty around there. People around Noapara are still a suppressed lot. They are tribals deprived of a great deal,” she says.

Roy plans to make a film set in British-era Bengal that will talk about the real people of the area. “I know my film will not change their lives or liberate them from the bane of casteism, but I still want to make it,” she says. “It will be about something that diverges from general notions of nationalism and freedom, and look at their lives through an alternative prism.”

Lessons from James Joyce

It was not so much cinema as literature that sowed in her the seeds of desire to tell stories and make films. “James Joyce’s abstract works, especially Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, inspired me,” says Roy. “I did not understand everything back then. So, I read and re-read to get a real sense of what Joyce was doing. I read The Dubliners and all his other books more than once. They left a lasting impression on me.”

Roy is now working on another Mumbai-set film that will be nothing like Songs of Forgotten Trees. “It will be fast-paced, moody, quirky, and about people on the city’s margins. It will be an experiment,” she says.    

The writer is a New Delhi-based film critic.